Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch
by R Coots
Summary: Big Daddy Johns gets a tip as to Riddick's last known location and flies out to investigate. Unfortunately, it may be a little too late. AU for Riddick. Ties in with HHYFN. Read, review, and I will love you!


Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

Dahl was waiting for him, leaning up against the _Griffin_ as he emerged from the Guild Hall. Her arms were crossed, and the look on her face was the same one she used on marks that had given them far more of a run for their money than she liked. That, or the idiot who used up all the hot water in the showers and left her to freeze while she shrieked obscenities at the poor fool. The woman had an unhealthy obsession with being clean, considering the line of work she'd chosen.

"And where the fuck you think you're going," she snapped when he got close enough that she didn't have to yell. Which was good. The cavern of a hangar echoed like a son of a bitch, and he didn't need her advertising the fact that he was slipping off in the middle of the night to any of the other mercs currently crashing in the bunks he'd just left. Especially not to the rest of their crew. Because if they woke up, he'd be stuck taking all of them with him.

For a bunch of people who sold their services to the highest bidder, they were an amazingly loyal group of people.

Fuckers anyways.

And Dahl was the worst of the lot. Getting rid of her was going to be a trick and a half.

"You know exactly where I'm going." Johns stalked past her and stuck the key in the lock for the ramp. She had to move so it wouldn't crush her and the look she shot him would have peeled paint. He raised an eyebrow at her and shook his head. She'd planted a foot on the ramp and propped an elbow over her knee, and the expression on her face hadn't changed a bit. She was going to make him argue with her.

Just so long as she didn't haul off and deck him. She'd be half justified, considering the monumental stupidity of what he was about to do.

The corners of her mouth twitched upwards, and her eyes lidded as if she knew what was running through his head. She probably did. They'd been working with each other long enough. Which was what had led to this little ambush in the first place.

"It's not even a lead," she said as he tossed hiss duffle up into the ship. "It was a merc, pissing off his disability pay in a bar that doesn't even serve real liquor. They give you fucking antifreeze!"

"Eve hired on with Toombs and got the edited sheet. A name and a price and a list of slams that wanted him back. We all know that." Johns stomped around the tail end of the ramp and started up, dodging his sniper's grab for his ankle on the way by. "Which, considering what happened to that jerkoff's _last_ crew, was one of the few smart things he could have done with his new people."

She followed him up into the ship, hands on her hips and full scale glare in place. "So that makes us what? For following you all over the fucking galaxy hunting this fucker. Fucking morons?"

Johns pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. This woman could out stubborn a rock. Come to think of it, that was how he'd ended up with her on his crew in the first place.

Old drunken bets aside, the self-same woman was shoving a finger in in chest and backing him up into the cryo nets. "Well," she hissed. "What does that fucking make us?"

"The best fucking crew I could ask for!" Johns swatted her hand away and bulled past her and up towards the cockpit. "But I'm _not_ fucking asking you to follow me right up to the Necro's fucking doorstep!"

She balled up a fist and he threw his hands in the air in defeat. "On the word of a fucking washed up drunk who might have been a half assed merc at one point!"

The fist lowered, then loosened it. For a moment he thought she was going to start yelling again. Finally she sighed. "So what? Say you get in without getting shot to bits. Say he's there. Then what are you going to do? Beat the story out of him?"

"If I have to."

"Boss," she stopped, growled, and started over again. "If the rumors are true. If he really did end up with the Armada, what the fucking hell makes you think you can get him to tell you anything? He's got the perfect fucking cover! Those people flatten civilizations! They destroy _planets_! And you want to go in there, one man, and demand answers from a guy that the most secure prisons in the _galaxy_ can't handle?"

"And if I take all of you in?" Johns dropped into the pilot's seat. "Get you all killed with no possible profit to show for it?"

"At least you'd have some backup!"

He shook his head and turned towards the console, skimming his hands over the banks of knobs and buttons as he ran a mental preflight check. She had a point. Going in solo was suicide. But so was taking his crew. And he wasn't going to be responsible for the deaths of good men and women for what was essentially a personal vengeance quest.

Quite frankly, he didn't fucking care if Riddick killed him. So long as he got his answers. So long as he got the story of how his son had died. The whole story. Something more than "His ship crashed and he was never heard from again". Anything.

Because if there was one thing he'd learned about this fucker Riddick, in all the years the man had been on the run; it was that he tended to own up to his kill count. That much of the man's past was in his file, even if the majority of the years before the Wailing War had been redacted. Even with his access levels, as boss of this crew.

"Johns." She was leaning over the back of his chair now.

"Dahl," he replied, before she could finish the sentence. "I'm doing this. I can't not know, you understand?"

He knew she did. Somehow. She wouldn't have stuck around this long, chasing con after con for base pay, saving up enough for the last final hunt to get this mother fucking son of a bitch, if she didn't understand on some level. He had to know. Had to know what had happened to the little boy who'd wanted to train wolfhounds. To the young man he'd caught standing in front of the mirror in his father's armor, flexing scrawny arms and making snarling faces at himself. To the man who'd stormed out of their living quarters and said he'd go it alone, fuck the universe and fuck needing a crew. They'd see. They'd all see. He didn't need to ride his father's coattails. He'd make his own success. Bag his own bounties.

And he had. And his father had been beyond proud.

"Fine," Dahl blew a bit of hair out of her eyes, then ran her hands through it for good measure. "Fine," she said again. "Go. Get yourself killed. Just leave me your codes so I can take over your credit accounts when you're dead."

Johns spun around in his chair, trying to figure out if she was serious or not. The little half smile she was wearing did nothing to set his mind at ease. He waited a moment, just to see if she'd crack, but there was no change.

"They're already set to default to you if I haven't been heard from in three months." He turned back around and started spinning up the engines. "Now, if you wouldn't mind, I have a suicide run to get started."

She dropped a hand to his shoulder and squeezed once, then clomped her way back out of the ship, muttering the entire way. She hit the button for the ramp on her way out, and he watched her stalk back to the door that led from the hangar to the rest of the Guild Hall. She stopped there, and turned to glare at him as he called the Flight Tower to have them open up the ceiling. Dust and debris blew, and the stars opened up above him as the panels irised open. She wasn't going to wave, but she was going to watch him leave.

Which was more than he'd done, when his son had gone off to catch his biggest prize yet.

Johns shook the memory from his head and pulled back on the control yoke.

It was time for some answers.

~MBMBMB~

Last anyone had heard of the Necros, they had been moving along the edges of occupied space, skimming past the mining and colony planets like they didn't even exist. People ran before the Armada, like a flock of birds from a hunter. They fled inward, towards Aquila, Sol Lucia, and the other systems of the Inner Arm. But the planets they left behind had remained untouched, for a little while.

It was what the Necros trailed in their wake that was spreading the most panic. It had even reached Lupus 5; and it had gotten so that the merc who was willing to follow a bounty out to the Edges was either truly desperate, or suicidal. Because whatever followed the Necromongers. Whatever it was they left behind them as they passed planet after planet; it _ate_ them up.

Johns mulled it over as he punched in the coordinates and activated the autopilot, then went to net himself into the cryo seats. People had started showing up on Lupus 5 in recent months. People from the worlds closest to the hub of the Galaxy. Merchants, frigates, even straggling remnants of security forces. One and all, they told the same story. A second Necromonger Armada. Following after the first. No one had gotten a good look at the people who travelled in it. But there were feeds from satellites. Images from deep space scopes and radar. Bits of security feeds caught in hard drives of the things, left with nowhere to transmit them to, because the planetside receivers were all gone.

People, trailing ghostly images of themselves as their hands reached for the necks and hearts of their victims before their bodies even moved. _Sucking_ at the bodies of those they'd caught. And leaving blackened destruction in their wake. Husks, tossed aside and left, waiting to be pulverized by the Icons the invading armies left behind.

The feeds cut out then, and from what he could gather from the images the scopes netted, the world's themselves withered. No one had sent out probes yet. At least not from Lupus 5. Not like they had for the Aquilan systems. Those planets, the ones hit before Helion Prime, they might one day be livable again. Something told Johns that whatever was crossing the galaxy now wasn't leaving _anything_ behind that was fit for life at all.

And then Quintessa had gone dark. And the panic had started for real. More people came through Lupus 5 looking for transport to the furthest edges of the Arm than they ever when it was just the Necros who were rampaging their way across space. The Elementals had fallen. The bastion of knowledge and high thinking. Left alone during every war, every trade conflict. Nobody messed with them. Chaos followed the few agents who left the planet of their birth, and nobody wanted to contaminate their luck by trying to take them on. Besides; they'd never showed any real interest in expanding their borders in the first place.

Best to let sleeping dogs lie.

The sleeping dog had been taken out back and shot.

So when the system alert started beeping and his cryo cuff disengaged from his arm some four weeks out of the Lupus System, he thought he'd just run across a stray. Someone who though heading crossways for the Edges of the Arm would be safer than running directly in front of the world eaters that were plowing directly down the center.

What he saw when he made it up to the cockpit nearly made him shit himself. It was one thing to say you were going knocking on the Necromongers' door. It was another thing entirely to find one of them floating next to you, airlocks ready to seal with your ship and an indeterminate number of fighters probably waiting to kill your ass.

How drunk _was _he when he cooked up this idiotic plan?

"Unidentified vessel. State your name and purpose."

Well at least they _sounded_ like people. And they were using the open channel hailing system mandatory for pretty much all space craft in the settled systems, so that was a point in the "Death Not Imminent" column. Although by the tone of the speaker's voice, that could change at a moment's notice. Or maybe it was just the half circle of fighters ranged out in front of him that were giving him that idea.

"My name is Johns. Captain of the _Griffin_. I'm a merc out of Lupus 5." A deep breath, and he committed himself. "I'm looking for information on a Richard B. Riddick."

Silence.

The fighters in front of him didn't move, and the fleet behind them hung motionless. The only good thing so far was that none of the bigger vessels had opened up their hatches to let more of the smaller strike force class ships out of their holds. Not that that couldn't change at a moment's notice.

Johns, you are seriously fucked up.

He was about to reach for the controls and hit the gas. He might be able to outrun them. He would definitely try. Then his comm beeped at him, the indicator letting him know what someone was requesting a face to face with him. His hand hovered over the acknowledge button for a moment be before he said fuck it. They were wanting to talk. And not shoot him to bits. It was what he'd wanted right?

The man on the screen was square jawed, hard eyed, and had a narrow mouth set in a grim line. He was wearing armor, black and ribbed, and it had seen its fair share of use. But it was the deep shadows in pasty skin and the gold dusted at his temples that really emphasized the truth of things. The Necromongers were a breed apart, and fucked was the person who ever forgot that.

"You say you seek the Riddick," the man said, and crossed his arms over his chest. "Why? And what makes you think he could be here?"

Johns blinked. Not just Riddick. _The_ Riddick. A if he was more than a man. As if he meant something to them. So even if he wasn't with them, they knew of _him_. The other man shifted slightly, and the merc realized that he'd gotten lost in his own thoughts.

"The last place it was rumored he was headed was Helion Prime. Which was the last world you people destroyed." A guess, but an educated one, all things considered. Eve had managed to track that shitty little undercutter the con had used to get off Crematoria back to the battered planet. And he certainly hadn't surfaced anywhere since." Johns shook the doubts from his head and focused on the issue at hand. "Have some questions for him."

The man's mouth twitched slightly. "Questions."

Johns clamped his lips shut on the anger and the snapping reply. He didn't need to tell this man his life's story. He didn't need to tell him what Riddick had done. All he really needed to know was if Riddick was still with them. After that he could wrangle a way on board. Maybe. If they didn't just blow him up.

Someone off screen handed the man something, a data tablet of some sort. He messed with it for a moment, flipping things Johns couldn't see back and forth. Finally he looked back up at Johns. "Well Mr. Johns. Follow the Screamers. They will show you where you may dock. Then we will see about your…questions." And then the screen went dark.

The fighters, or Screamers, had enclosed the _Griffin_ completely. Johns snarled, but dropped back into the pilot's seat and strapped himself in. The Screamer directly in front of him wobbled its wings, and with no further warning, shot off into the midst of the Armada. Johns hit the gas and followed.

At least they hadn't blown him up yet.

~ MBatR ~

The ship they led him too was massive. Beyond massive actually. He could have squeezed most of a decent sized city into it, and still had space to rattle around half a spaceport. It had multiple docking bays; cavernous openings that made his ship look like a gnat landing on the back of an elephant.

He followed the Screamers into one, and tried not to stare around him as he took a slot much further to the back of the room than he'd like. But the little fighters still had him hemmed in, and clearly knew where they wanted him to land. It wasn't quite a gift horse, being brought on board the ship. More like being handed a grenade he was pretty sure was live. But he'd asked for it, and now he was stuck.

He was just glad that he'd managed to leave Dahl and the rest behind.

There was a group of people headed his way, and he went through the post flight checklist as quickly as he could. He managed to finish and get to the hatch before they arrived, and he stood there at the base of the ramp, watching them come. The pilots of the Screamers had stayed in their ships, but he was under no illusions. There was nowhere to run anyways.

The little cluster of people came to a halt a few feet away, and in the center of a pile of guards was the same man he'd been talking to. The armor covered him entirely, leaving only his head exposed. Battered and worn, he still carried it as if it weighed nothing. As if he walked around in thirty kilos of metal on a daily basis. He probably did.

There was a moment of silence, and Johns tried to figure out what to say. So this is the fleet that destroys worlds? Where is Riddick? How much is he worth to you?

The other man beat him to the punch. "Truly, why is it you seek the Riddick?"

There was that title again. Johns frowned and sorted through what he was willing to say. "I'm a bounty hunter by trade. Price on his head is worth a lot."

The other man eyed him, his gazed calculating. "He is worth double if brought back dead, is this not true?"

Well there went that little secret. Did that mean they had him and didn't want to let him go? That the rumors were true and he was the reason they'd left Helion Prime? Or did it just mean that the Necromongers knew more about the working of the universe than most people thought?

"Yeah. But it's like the old saying. Dead men tell no tales."

The corners of the man's mouth twitched, like he knew something Johns didn't. The merc Boss fought to keep his face impassive. This man was starting to get under his skin. Did they have Riddick or didn't they? Why the fuck had they brought him here on such scant information?

The Necro came a little closer, out of the ring of guards. Hands behind his back, he tipped his head to one side and studied Johns. "What sort of questions might a man in your profession have for Riddick? What is it you think he knows that is worth risking your life by coming here? I have not heard of many bounties bigger than the one he carries."

Blue eyes, blond hair. Hands reaching and a little voice begging to be thrown up in the air and caught. So he could fly.

"He killed my son."

It was out before he could stop it, and he dropped a hand to the butt of his gun out of sheer instinct. He'd just fucked up. Just told these world enders exactly what he hadn't meant to tell pretty much anyone if he could help it. Now they knew his weakness. Now they could exploit it.

The Necro blinked slightly, and something in his face slackened momentarily. Almost like grief. What the fuck?

"Do you know where he is or not," Johns snapped to cover his surprise. "Was he ever here? Is he _still_ here?"

"No." The word was simple. Final. Defeat. "He left. Over a year ago."

Something in Johns withered. A year. He was over a year behind the fuck and now he probably wasn't going to make it off this fucking ship. He'd signed his death warrant for nothing. No answers. No results. End of the line.

"However, you have a skill set that I believe may be useful." Johns blinked and stared at the man in front of him, trying to figure out what the fuck he meant by that. The man kept talking, but he must have noticed the merc's surprise. "We too, are looking for him. And where he has gone I do not believe we can easily follow."

What the fucking hell?  
"Now," the man continued. "Normally we would offer Conversion. A chance to move beyond pain and suffering and into the glory that is being a Necromonger."

No. No fucking way. He didn't even need to know what Conversion entailed. All he needed to do was look at the blank faced guards before him; remember the worlds that had fallen to these freaks. It'd be a cold day in hell first.

"The usual alternative is death." The man's face twitched slightly as Johns stiffened in surprise. "However, circumstances being what they are, Conversion is currently inadvisable and killing you…" he shrugged. "Killing you would be a waste of a possible resource."

Johns latched on to the one part of the man's words he knew he could understand. "What do you mean, can't easily follow him. Don't you people go wherever the fuck you want? What'd he do, drop himself through a black hole?"

The Necromonger shook his head. "Worse. If you would come with us, you can see for yourself."

It all sounded very friendly to Johns. Very politic. Not that he had any basis of comparison for how he'd expected the Necros to act, but civil conversation and polite requests definitely wouldn't have made the list. He knew that for damn sure.

But it wasn't as if he was in a position to refuse. Six guns to his one stuck while in the belly of a Necromonger ship with no way out. Maybe Riddick could beat those odds. Maybe he had. But Johns knew that his talents lie in tracking people down, not evading capture. So he followed.

~MBatR~

The room he was led to was decorated along the same lines as everything else he'd seen in the walk from the hangar. Small statues and large. Bas-relief along the walls and even the construction of the equipment featured human bodies in every imaginable form of pain. All made of the same black metal, their stylized mouths gaped in agony and silent screams. Their eyes were twisted shut or wide and staring, and the overall impression was that of having fallen into a torture pit.

The people though, were almost worse. Blank faced, deathly pale and almost eerily incurious about the stranger walking in their midst. He'd realized something though. This wasn't just an army. Not in the conventional sense of the word. This was a civilization. A nation, if you would, of people who did nothing but travel across the stars and destroy worlds. There were soldiers, yes. A great many of them patrolled the halls. But there were men and women here who looked and acted nothing like fighters. Support staff, he supposed. All the extra people that came with flying huge ships and keeping a war machine going.

The mind boggled. He was still trying to absorb the implications when their little contingent came to a halt in a large round room. There was a table in the center, also round, and its surface shimmered and oscillated almost as if it were alive. Pillars in the shape of men held the table up, and each one of them looked as if they carried a world on their shoulders, not just a slab of metal. Johns made sure to pick a place along its edge that kept him far out of reach of them.

"This," the lead Necro said, "is the galaxy as we know it." He touched a control on the edge of his side of the table and the surface of the thing quivered, flowed and hardened.

Johns blinked. It was the galaxy, thrown up in relief by who knew what sort of substance. Thin tendrils of the stuff held up a multitude of stars and planets. The form rippled in place, and became their little section of the galaxy. Johns resisted the temptation to poke at the stuff. What kept it up like that? Nanites? And electrostatic charged? Selective anti-gravity?

"And this is the section in which we live." The look on the Necro's face was impassive, but there was a twitch at the corner of his mouth that told Johns that he knew what was going through the merc's head.

Johns nodded and wondered when the man would get around to his point. "I know the map. Been all over it. What's this got to do with Riddick, other than the fact that he could be anywhere?"

"But he's not anywhere," the man fiddled with the controls again and the images on the table shifted and grew. "In fact, he's not even in this part of the galaxy anymore."

Johns frowned and leaned forward. If he wasn't mistaken, the Necro had added another section of the Arm to what was already up. Planets and stars that he didn't recognize trailed off around the spiral. He'd probably seen them from any number of night skies, but never on any charts associated with settled space.

Something in the distant reaches of those unknown systems pulsed a little larger. Johns frowned at it, then up at the man across from him. "You're saying he took off and headed out past the Edges? Why? What's out there anyways, except unsettled planets and a fucking metric ton of nothing?"

Now the man did smile. Not much, and it was more knowing than amused, but it was a full expression. "People," he said. "More people."

Johns blinked and went over every bit of history and astronomy he could think of. He supposed it could be possible. If a group of settlers got very, very off course. But why would Riddick head their direction? Unless he didn't know they were there in the first place?

The question was out of his mouth before he really thought about it. But he didn't take it back. He wanted to know after all. Although he wouldn't bet on the man giving him the truth and nothing but. There was a catch here somewhere, some reason this man had brought him here and was showing him this instead of throwing him to the wolves.

Something in the other man's eyes shuttered, and the line of his mouth firmed. Johns almost thought he wasn't going to answer.

"You say you've been hunting Riddick. How long, approximately?"

"Ten years. Give or take." Johns' hands fisted at his sides. "What's that got to do with all this?"

"Did you know he had a girl?"

Johns blinked and felt a sort of tectonic shift go off in his mind. "No. A daughter?"

"She was too old for that. Early twenties, at least physically. Depending on how much time she'd spent in cryo, she could have been older." The man shrugged. "She joined us on Crematoria. Accepted the Conversion after she snuck aboard our ship. Considering the alternative, a lifetime of pain after the things I assume she must have seen and done to be dropped on that planet in the first place, it was more than a fair trade."

Johns was going back over the facts in his head. Crematoria. It fit, if the man was telling the truth. Eve said she'd never been able to figure out why Riddick just let her slap the cuffs on him. But if he'd known someone on the inside. If he'd let himself be caught with the idea of getting the girl out... But that flew in the face of everything he'd ever learned about the man. He was a loner. A murderer and sociopath of the highest order. He ripped through prison security systems like they were wet tissue, and the body count he left behind was always impressive. But he'd never, not in all the years he'd been on the run, actually taken anyone out with him. Nor had he shown any sign that he cared what happened to those around him.

"You're fucking with me."

The Necro shook his head. "I left him dead on the runway. Or so I thought. He came after us, snuck aboard the Basilica just before we left Helion Prime, and confronted the Lord Marshal in the throne room. But it wasn't until Zhylaw brought the girl forward to try and win Riddick over to the Faith that I realized the extent of his attachment to her." The Necro's face was troubled. "He simply asked her if she was with him. And when she died, after burying a spear in Zhylaw's back a few minutes later, he held her."

Johns fought to keep from gaping. This wasn't real. It wasn't Riddick and it wasn't possible.

But the Necromonger wasn't done. "He had, of course, killed the Lord Marshal by that point." His face was sour, and Johns would have bet the _Griffin_ that there was a lot more to that story than met the eye. But if this man was in a mood to give information, he wasn't about to cut the flow. This was more than he'd heard of his quarry since he'd found Eve. More information than anyone knew about the Necromongers. He was going to need it if he was going to catch this guy. Even if he was going to take it all with a mountain of salt.

"So what," he said, and his voice came out harsher than he'd planned. "He just sat there with a dead girl in his arms? What happened that he took off for unknown parts of space? That was almost two years ago."

The Necro frowned. "He had the girl put into cryo and spent the next year consolidating his rule." His mouth twisted in a hard line and his eyes burned, but he didn't offer any explanation. One day he simply ordered a ship, packed up the girl's cryo box, and took off. "

Johns blinked. Looked hard at the man in front of him. Tried to wrap his mind around an assessment of Riddick that included the murdering freak caring for anyone but himself; and came up wanting. There had to be an explanation. Had to be a reason. Even if this man was telling him the truth.

Because every record he'd ever seen of the man who'd killed his son had outlined a very consistent pattern of behavior, insofar as anything about Riddick could be called consistent. He didn't team up with any one. He might use them and move on. Or he might screw with their heads, play mind games and pull superiority pranks. On one momentous occasion, he'd even given a prison psychologist a detailed map of his cell block, complete with a route drawn through it. And later, he'd used that exact route to escape.

Johns still couldn't decide if it was supreme arrogance or something else that made Riddick hang around and toy with people rather than cutting and running the minute he had a chance. Frankly, he didn't want to know. All he cared about was getting his answers. Turning Riddick in for the bounty would just be the icing on the cake as far as he was concerned.

The Necromonger was still watching him, probably waiting for a reaction of some sort. Johns watched him back, trying to get a read on this man. To see if he could figure out why he was so willing to share information on Riddick. There had to be a reason. Politics? Personal vengeance? Riddick had killed his King, and if the man was as high up the ladder as he seemed to be, that certainly left a couple of options. Maybe _he'd _had his eyes on whatever passed for a throne around here. In which case, why not just take it after Riddick took off?

But his face gave away nothing, and neither did his body language.

"You said he found people? How do you know? You have telescopes that reach that far? You've seen signs?"

The Necro shrugged and reached for the table again. The section of unknown planets boiled, and solidified at a larger scale. There was a line, coming in from outside the section, and stopping just short of a cluster of five stars with an inordinate number of planets attached.

"This," the man said, "Is how we believe he may have approached them. In truth we have never looked in that direction. Until recently. And what we have seen indicates a far denser population than anything in the known systems. In other times, his location would not matter so much." His face was hard as he looked up to meet Johns eyes. "In fact, in other times, I'd say good riddance to him, and leave him to whatever he found there."

"I hear a big fucking 'but' in there," Johns muttered.

The man nodded. "Just so. These are not ordinary times. And our religion has become perverted. Only the Lord Marshal, the _true_ Lord Marshall, can right what has happened. Without him, we cannot go to Underverse, and those who die before their due time run the risk of becoming…" he stopped and shook his head. "Suffice to say, we go to bring him back. Which is where you come in."

"What? You want me to come with you? I'll say it again. What can I do that you can't do on your fucking own?" Johns braced his hands on the edge of the table and glared. He wasn't going to jump at the chance. Wasn't going to sign on to play bloodhound for a bunch world conquering freaks. He was going to ignore the fact that this was probably the only way he'd get his answers. And he damn sure wasn't going to dream of what he'd do to Riddick if he ever managed to track him across such a vast distance

"Be hidden," the man replied shortly. "Slip in, slip out. Find Riddick and bring him back to the Basilica with no one the wiser for it." He stopped, took a deep breath like he was stealing himself for something, and charged on. "The Necromonger Army is unfit for a full scale war or invasion of such an unknown place."

The Necro stood to his full height and stared at Johns. "And more importantly, my people are not skilled in infiltration and extraction that does not involve a great deal of bloodshed. And those we have that _could _slip in undetected, possibly, are not going to have the ability to apprehend Riddick. That is why I need you, to find the Riddick and bring him back to the fleet so that we may solve this issue and purify our faith."

"And what makes you think I'll be willing to do that?"

"You were desperate enough to find him that you came here didn't you? Besides,"the man's mouth quirked again. "There are many more mercs out there, I'm sure we will run across them before we leave the settled systems. Money is nothing to us. We could triple the price on his head and have any one of a number of volunteers. And you, Mr. Johns, would be left floating in the Black, dead and answerless."

The man had a point. A very valid one. Unless you were thoroughly pissed at the man, or an idiot of the highest order; who would be dumb enough to go after him, knowing his record of escapes? And who besides someone completely invested in finding that fucker would be willing to fly right into the jaws of an Armada of people known to leave no survivors? Unless it was for a fucking shit ton of money? And if a merc was truly that desperate for the cash, they'd walk into Hell itself to drag their payday back out and collect.

He reached for the straws he had left. "That still doesn't explain why you're so sure that's exactly where he went. Ion trails dissipate. He could have switched ships. He could have crashed or even just sent the thing on ahead on autopilot."

The Necro nodded, as if he'd passed a test of some sort. The gesture should have pissed the merc Boss off, but he was curious now. And interested, all against his will. "Valid points," the man said. "Except for one thing. Every Necromonger is tagged when they choose Conversion and take the scars. When they die, their marker in our databanks goes dark." He leaned forward and braced his hands on the edge of the table, his face intent and troubled. "The girl that Riddick knew, she was very dead. Impaled through the back. Yet her marker in the databank has lit up again."

Johns stared and tried not to believe what his ears were telling him. "You mean he…found a way to bring her back?"

The Necro shrugged. "How or why is not known. But we do know that this section of space," he jabbed a finger down at the floating cluster of suns and planets. "Is where her signal came from."

**Author's Note: ** Hey hey all. Figured I'd post this before it burned out my brain. Or sat on my hard drive so long the plot bunnies took it and did…things to it. Because they tend to do that. Escape their cages and go running around.

This story is hooked into the HHYFN verse, that big long monster of a Firefly/Riddick fic I'm in the process of finishing up. So we've got characters from Riddick 3, but we're not touching down on that planet with the mud monsters. Confused? Go read the first chap of HHYFN. It's ok. I'll wait

Riddick is, always, not mine. Not him, not his universe, not any of the other characters than inhabit it. Dang huh?

Read, review, follow, go read my other fic, and I shall love you FOREVER! XD


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